City renews recycle depot operational contract with SaskAbilities

SaskAbilities recycle depot staff were recognized for being Safe Places certified at a regular City of Swift Current council meeting, Feb. 12. From left to right, councillors George Bowditch, Bruce Deg, SaskAbilities staff Kevin Jensen, Kyle Froese, Deb Bowditch, and Blaine Prentice, and councillors Pat Friesen, Ron Toles, and Chris Martens.

The City of Swift Current has renewed the contract for the operation of the multi-material recycle depot with SaskAbilities.

Councillors approved a motion at a regular council meeting on Feb. 12 to renew the contract for one year with an option to renew for two additional years.SaskAbilities Regional Director Kimi Duzan and recycle depot staff attended the meeting. She announced that depot staff have completed the training and application process to become Safe Place Youth Certified.SaskAbilities also operates the City’s transit contract for access and public transit services in the community, and those transit staff are already Safe Places Youth Certified.“We’re particularly proud to have another team Safe Places certified,” Duzan told the meeting. “We feel that knowledge protects vulnerable people. … SaskAbilities serves to be an employer of people of all abilities. Each person that has that knowledge is empowered to keep themselves safe as well. So it really is very important that we understand all of those ramifications, how it benefits the individual, the team and the community, and it identifies and supports those that need to learn to do different and do better.”The City of Swift Current launched the Safe Places Youth Certified initiative in early 2016 to reduce the risk of abuse and bullying for youth in the community through a certification process for adults. During the certification process an applicant must complete criminal record and vulnerable sector checks.Duzan was excited about the renewal of the recycle depot contract, which continues the relationship between SaskAbilities and the City. “We’re proud of the service, the quality, the outcome, the product, and little or no contamination,” she said.The contract makes it possible for SaskAbilities to provide a service to the community while also achieving the organization’s own goal to build inclusive communities for people of all abilities, and to provide programs and services to people who are experiencing disabilities.She noted that recycle depot staff play an important role to interact with community members at the facility and to educate them about the different recyclable materials accepted at the depot.“The community is empowered really to bring back product that’s better sorted,” she said. “That’s a key role that we play, that educational opportunity.”SaskAbilities has been providing this contracted service since 2008. Under the terms of the new agreement the organization will provide operational services at the depot for 2018 at a cost of $184,269.12 plus GST. The renewal of the contract for two subsequent years will include a two per cent increase per year increment.“When we can, when it makes sense, we like to use contracted services,” the City’s general manager of infrastructure and operations Mitch Minken said after the meeting. “It avoids having our own staff performing the service. For us it provides an opportunity to support a very good program in what SaskAbilities is doing. So that’s an added benefit as well.”The recycle depot is a busy operation with about 40,000 vehicle visits per year or about 133 vehicle visits a day. Staff will greet about 700 to 800 customers per week. This multi-material recycle depot accepts paper, boxboard, cardboard, tin, cans, glass and plastics. It diverts about 750 tonnes of material annually from the landfill, which is equivalent to about 27.5 kilograms of recyclable material per resident.“When you talk about paper and cardboard and plastics, that’s a lot of volume,” he said. “The weight may not seem to be too big, but it’s a lot of volume of product. So it’s a lot of airspace that’s saved in the landfill.”The City of Swift Current multi-stream operation requires that residents separate materials before they bring it to the recycle depot, which prevents contamination of recyclable material and makes it easier to find a market for the different items.In other communities in the province a single stream collection is still more common, which means that households will place all recyclable materials in a single container for collection and it then has to be separated at a sorting centre. A recent decision by China to not accept certain types of recyclable waste material due to concerns about contamination might have a significant impact on the global recycling industry, but it is less of a concern for multi-stream recycling operations such as the one in Swift Current.“We’re experiencing no issues with marketing our product because our product is so clean,” Minken said. “It’s all separated at source and the SaskAbilities folks are there to guide our citizens as they’re dropping stuff off to make sure that we keep those contamination levels down very low. So we aren’t experiencing some of the problems that other jurisdictions are.”